Armand Da'Ran is perhaps the
most famous of the NybelmarianAnis-Anpagan mages. Although he was
not very appreciated in his own time (he lived between 1750 b.S. and 1702 b.S.)
and with a controversial legacy, he is still to be considered the father of the
Anpagan'smagic system as it presents itself nowadays.
Apart from that, he is also known to be the first that perfected a method for
taming the dreaded seawyrms of the Zyloth Sea, a deed that would eventually
bring Anis-Anpagan to the total
domination of the southern Nybelmarianwaters.

Picture description.Armand Da'Ran fighting he
Great Sea Serpent Bala'ur at the southern waters
of Nybelmar. Image drawn by
Isilhir.

Appearance.
Armand Da'Ran was known as a man of high stature with an athletic body (quite an
uncommon thing for a mage), very preoccupied with his looks. He kept his
brown-reddish hair long and, when he was not traveling, he was wearing a pointed
moustache and a beak-like beard. Very courteous, he was known to be of an
undisturbable calm, never raising his voice even at times when he probably
should have. Also, although he was by many considered to be a very pleasant
presence in society, he was quite an introverted man and had very few friends
throughout his entire life.

Biography.Foolish Youthfulness. Armand Da'Ran was born in the
noble House that controlled the Ansaran Island before the republic. As a child
he was entrusted to the local Mage Guild for education - something considered to
be of "good taste" among the Anpagan nobles. At the end of his studies he was
marked as "average", managing to pass almost unobserved through all the classes
he took. Thus, having a hard time finding a suitable activity as a fresh
mageling, his family arranged for him a healer position at the office of the
Southern Fleet-Patrol. But soon he proved to be quite unfit for this activity
preferring to engage himself in dubious entertainments rather than trying to
improve his skills as he should have.

In 1728 b.S. the Southern Fleet-Patrol managed to intercept and sink an
important transport sent by one of the
Murmillion Legates from east of
Raneshar to supply the besieged city of Kylos. Loyal to the
Korweynite dynasty founded by
Narve the Wise (the dynasty which held the
Anpagan throne at that time) the
Southern Fleet-Patrol thus managed to cause the fall of Kylos - a stronghold of
the Benedictus family, the
Korweynites' rivals for the Anpagan
throne. Armand Da'Ran didn't have anything to do with this battle though, except
for the fact that he hid himself under the deck of the command ship.
Nevertheless, he was welcomed as a hero and given all the honors along with the
other captains of the Southern Fleet-Patrol, in the capitol city of
Anpagan. The huge reception
following the honours though would prove to be a turning point in his life.
There he met Cara, the young daughter of the House Da'Luna and, as it happened
to many other suitors, he fell in love with her.

Before meeting Cara Da'Luna, Armand was spending his time as a healer of the
Southern Fleet-Patrol, more roaming the brothels in the
Anpagan ports, after that he started
to spend his time in the city of Lun, trying to win Cara's heart and her
family's mind. Being away from his duty though caused a lot of complaints from
the Fleet captains both to his family and to the royal court. Threatened to be
disinherited - which would have meant to lose any chances to marry his beloved -
Armand remembered that he was a mageling after all and came up with the craziest
plan to win Cara's heart and to show both her family and his that he was the
most suitable pretender. In order to accomplish that he planned to do something
that was never done before, a deed that would be remembered long after his
death: to kill one of the dreaded seawyrms of the Zyloth Sea...

A Serpent's Egg. Armand Da'Ran prepared for this
deed for several months, returning to his duty post and trying to persuade as
many captains as possible that such an attempt would be possible and also
necessary. It is worth mentioning that no one until then ever managed to win an
engagement with these gigantic sea serpents. They were also the reason why no
ship had ever managed to safely venture on the Zyloth Sea. Thus it is needless
to say that if a method of disposing these fierce beasts could be found, the
routes to the distant Zhunite colonies would suddenly shorten considerably,
boosting the economy of the Kingdom to unprecedented heights.

Thus, in the next year, in the Month of the Singing Bird, while the Kingdom was
luxuriating in the celebration of its founding, Armand Da'Ran took five of the
Southern Fleet-Patrol's ships and left the Worthas harbor heading for the open
sea. Without having a very clear plan in mind about what he was about to do, he
wanted to use the magic of the five elements
(as in the Korweynite Doctrine of Essences) to pacify the seawyrm while the
sailors should attempt to kill it.

Yet this courageous deed was not meant to happen on that day. Their trip ended
with a major disaster, three of their ships being sunk while they were fighting
the serpent and one sank on its way back back to Worthas. Upon arrival Armand
managed to flee into the city and to escape the royal guards who were already
holding him responsible for the loss of the four ships.

The Mage Guild claimed that the disaster was caused by an irresponsible act,
since Armand had clearly shown that he didn't have mastered the
magic of the elements (otherwise he would have
known that it was impossible to "pacify" such a monster) asking for the capital
punishment. The Fleet Admiral and the King though decided to accuse him only of
"misuse of given resources". A ban was then enacted upon Armand and thus he had
no other option than to flee the Kingdom or risk being captured and exiled on
one of the small and remote southern islands.

Prior to leaving the Kingdom Armand Da'Ran secretly visited his beloved once
more, persuading her to join him. Yet after a week of traveling the lands as
fugitives she fell sick. With the royal guards on their trails they sadly agreed
to separate their paths: Cara stayed behind, bait for their hunters, while he
was making his way to the Anpagan-city harbor to board the first ship to sail
away from these shores. That was to be towards the eastern islands of Kaleman.

For the rest of his life Armand should never set foot on
Anpagan lands again, yet the tragedy
that he had caused and with the fact in mind that his beloved Cara would
probably be lost to him forever, always made him to assiduously search for a way
to return to his homeland and obtain redemption. That seawyrm, the Great
Serpent, or Bala'urul, as Armand often referred to it, haunted his dreams night
after night until he partly identified himself with it: "The Great Serpent laid
its eggs in my womb that day," he would say towards the end of his life, "and
with those eggs my life had become one with the Serpent's... From that day I had
my own Bala'ur, just like Narve, the Wisest of our Kings had his, when he showed
us the way to freedom for the first time."

A Serpent's Tongue. Armand Da'Ran spent his years
of exile again as a healer, "serving" on a pirate ship stalking the Kaleman
trade routes to the Korweynite
provinces controlled by Murmillion
Lords. His mind was always pondering the seawyrm disaster though, trying to find
a way to undo the damage that he had caused. Thus his interests were slowly
drawn to the history of the last years of the first
Korweyn Empire. And this, because
the stories he picked up from various
Korweynites that he met, were always mentioning a strange kind of
magic used by
Murmillions in their bloody
campaign, a magic that seemingly made people do
things against their will. He especially gathered the stories about
Theodunn Pheronn and his battles, a
Murmillions general that became a
feared and hated tyrant after the end of that campaign. He even spent one year
in the Korweynite city of Kosth
trying to gather as much information as possible about the ancient battle of the
Eypesh Delta when it is said that the brave
Korweynite fleet managed to
prevent Theodunn from gaining a foothold beyond the
great river. Although the outcome of this battle was eventually proven to be
unimportant (even if it slowed down the
Murmillion advancement), the
accounts telling of Korweynites
fighting against their brothers were quite confusing for Armand.

He knew that finding a way to explain and reproduce this
magical effect, by which one could influence
another mind, could be the key in fighting Bala'urul. Yet even if he was to
stumble upon an explanation he also knew that he would still be far away from
the actual solution (not knowing if the
Murmillion method would work on
beasts as well). However, it was after his time spent on the
Korweynite coast, when he started
to talk more and more often about a "wise shadow" following him, "walking
through his dreams". Because of that he also lost his position among the
pirates, who abandoned him for this madness.

Armand Da'Ran's exile was just coming to an end though, as back in his homeland
a group of Aseyan clerics,
supported by some of the noble families and as well a small part of the Mage
Guild, managed to succeed in a coup and were trying to set the Kingdom on the
path of their religion. Armand heard about this and he also heard that they had
lifted the ban placed upon him, forgiving his actions by considering that they
were made upon the trust in Aseya's
precepts.

In 1717 b.S. Armand returned to his homeland just to see the lands thrown into
anarchy. Especially on the mainland, the peasants were rioting everywhere,
gathering in bands of outlaws, and the nobility was divided in two factions both
claiming the throne - thus they were constantly plundering each other's lands
and besieging each other's castles. The theocratic regime that had brought him
back lasted only a couple of years, falling after a huge riot in the
Anpagan-city. In all this chaos he searched for his beloved Cara, only to find
her married into the Benedictus family (Armand's family, Da'Ran, was loyal to
the Korweynite dynasty, which
made them enemies of the Benedictus who were claiming the throne for
themselves). She also had a young daughter with rumors telling that she was
Armand's bastard, but he would never find out about this. Disappointed and not
wanting to take part at his nation's newfound self-destructive appetite he
retreated to the Ansaran Island.

In the years to come Armand Da'Ran wrote enormously and worth mentioning would
be a complete history dealing with the fall of the first
Korweyn Empire and the extended
analysis on the Korweynite religion.
Yet the most important of his works is the series of tomes dedicated to the
magic system as used in
Anis-Anpagan. The fundamental change
that he operated on this system though, would only be fully adopted by the Mage
Guild after his death. Basically he criticized the way in which
magic was perceived by the Guild, as just an
extension of the Doctrine of Essences, which was a reflection of the
Korweynite religious system. The
Anpagan mages thus were revolving
around the five Korweynite
essences (or elements) separately, and only the oldest of them were considered
able to combine their forces. The first critique brought by Armand Da'Ran was
that this system must be stripped of its religious content in order to work -
only by ceasing to see godly beings behind the essences one can access their
truth so that their power could be used. The second critique that he brought was
that the essences should never be considered alone but only together as being
the true reflection of the world.

"I am standing here now,
walking my eyes over horizons. Silently, watching the struggle. Marveling
at its complexity. Who made all these be? Or what made them be? And truly
- can there be just one thing from which everything had spawned?

As I stand here I see that always, no matter on which horizon I lay my
eyes upon, there are four directions in which I can head.

And also if I look up, I see the sky fighting the earth in its difference.
Just two paths, two sides. Yet beside them I can see two more sides, two
more paths: the night and the day, fighting each other and fighting the
other two.

And also if I look upon my life I will see four, again. As we are children
and that is one, and we are men and that is two, and we are old and that
is three, and we are dead and that is four.

Thus even the Korweynite says that we have four mighty beings watching
over us. We have Inthadín, who smiles upon us from above, we have Bothú,
the sorrow and the abyss, we have Calderón, the great hunter of the skies
and we have Thiát, bringer of peace and healer...

And again I am standing, walking my eyes over horizons. Yes, I say, four
in number must be those which hold our lives, but the image is not yet
complete. As there is a fifth, that which brings them together, just as I
brought them together now, in this walk.

We have the Will and we have the Blood, but also we have the Breath and we
have the Flesh. But there must be also something else, something that can
keep them together, something that can stand in between. And that thing is
the fifth, the Soul. For the Soul is that which is contained in
everything."

-- Armand Da'Ran, "The Essences Explained" in
"Lectures on the New Knowledge"

Finally, the most important
change was that in the study of magic one
should never start from these essences, but from the effects that are to be
pursued. Needless to say, why these theories were not easily accepted among the
Anpagan mages. Therefore Armand
needed a viable proof to show that he was right. That was when Bala'ur, the
Great Serpent of the Zyloth Sea was reported again on the southern
Anpaganshores.

Image description.Armand
Da'Ran in the process of creating clay golems.Picture from
the game Magical
Empire™, used with friendly permission. Illustration
drawn by Faugar.

A Serpent's Skin.Already
since 1707 b.S. Armand Da'Ran was experimenting on a
golem creation spell. He believed that
transferring one’s spiritual essence into it could animate a lifeless object.
However all his experiments resulted only in brief periods of time when the
object was animated while he was in a state of unconsciousness. He thought that
this effect was caused by a certain "degradation" of the essence while the
foreign body hosted it. Yet he found no reasonable explanation for this apparent
"degradation". His only guess was that his spiritual essence was somehow
incompatible with that of the lifeless object (which was already a theory way
out of the main line of the Mage Guild - who at that
time considered the fifth essence as being just the same with the others and not
having that special place accorded by Armand in his writings). There are many
reasons to believe that by 1702 b.S. Armand Da'Ran was already heading towards a
viable theoretical solution to this problem (reasons like the Mage Guild's later
perfected method of golem
creation and as well as the emergence of the
Daedhirian undead mages,
claiming their descendence from Armand's apocryphal writing
"Daedhir"), but he never got to
finish his research.

When Bala'urul, the fearsome beast of the Zyloth Sea was spotted once again
close to the
Anpagan shores, Armand knew that this was his last chance to face that which
ruined his life 25 years earlier. He took with him a young and rather naive
"apprentice" (with Armand's reputation he didn't actually have
any apprentices, but he was paying a few fishermen from his Family's lands to
help him in the experiments) and, leaving everything behind, he set off on a
small rowing boat to meet his doom. The apprentice said later that Armand was
always assuring him that no seawyrm would attack such a small vessel
- well, it seems this information wasn't precisely true. With the sea
being almost unnaturally calm in that day we can say reasonably enough that this
was the only way by which Armand could have tried a possible approach of the
monster.

Calling it by the name ("You are my Bala'ur! Bala'ur! Show yourself to me, for I
carry your precious offspring within! Bala'ur!" - as the later accounts of the
apprentice's story tell) and agitating a rope by throwing it in and out of the
water, Armand probably
looked like he was somehow fishing for the seawyrm. Clouds were starting
to darken the sky and the more and more frightened apprentice was about to leave
his master to his madness and swim back to the shores, when the sea suddenly
grew beneath them and the dreaded jaws of the Great Serpent sprung from the
furious waves. The apprentice later described the monster as being so long that
his body seemed like a never-ending spiral leading to the deepest pits of the
Netherworlds themselves. The rope was
caught in one of the seawyrm's fangs and it is unknown to this very day if that
was just an accident or indeed Armand had a precise use for it. However, the
seawyrm was about to throw them both out of the boat when the apprentice
swore that he saw Armand releasing a mad roar while a
blinding light was swirling around his body. The Great Serpent made a deep
plunge and Armand collapsed into the boat rigid like a stone. Inhuman sounds
were coming out of his throat and when the apprentice leaned into him to see
what happened he crushed his left hand into his bared fist. Screaming in pain
the young apprentice fainted and thus he couldn't tell exactly how much time
passed until he woke up. Armand Da'Ran was already dead, however, and to the
greatest surprise of the young apprentice the huge body of the dreaded Bala'ur
was floating lifeless around their boat.

Armand Da'Ran's diaries, the at firstmysterious death of the Great Serpent and the
apprentice's story to explain what had transpired
meant the beginning of a new era for the
Anpagan Mage Guild, and with it for
Anis-Anpagan itself. Using Armand's research the mages finally perfected a
method for taming these huge beasts roaming the southern
Nybelmarian waters. They also understood what Armand
did exactly in that day: a "transgression" - he
managed to transfer his soul essence into the serpent and take the serpent's
into himself. This is also the base of the taming method still applied by the
Anpaganmages
to this day. However it takes a very skilled and strong mageling to be able to
take on such an endeavor (as the method means a continuous string of such brief
transgressions). But Armand's deed was driven by his hate of that particular
monster. He wanted to kill it and not to tame it. And the only way in which he
could have done that was to kill himself in the process too. He knew very well
that the last encounter with "his Bala'ur" would be the last day of his life as
well. Yet he didn't care anymore, asthat was his choice.

Importance.
Armand Da'Ran is a central character for the history of
Anis-Anpagan. His
extended research shaped their
magic system, as it is known
today, while his brave deed opened the Zyloth Sea for the
Anpagan galleys,
which meant their beginnings as a major sea power in
Caelereth. For this reason the
Anpagan banners are
still bearing the symbol of the great seawyrms. Armand Da'Ran was also the first
golem builder in
Anpagan, a craft
that was in time developed almost close to perfection. But as with his
controversial personality, his legacy also bears a dark side as well. The
Venlaken Enclave, the cursed lands of undead horrors finds its origins in
Armand's writings. "Daedhir - The
Forbidden Book of All Fears" stands at the foundation of the undead mages'
organization and they all claim that it was written by the great mage. The
Anpagan Mage Guild
moved its main quarters on Armand's island, Ansaran, trying to impose a ban on
any kind of experimentations that would involve the soul transgressions on other
than lifeless objects. The Venlaken
Daedhirians claim just the
opposite, believing that Armand's legacy is ultimately a means for achieving
immortality through such transgressions. All in all, everyone agrees that if the
exiled Korweynite Lord, Narve the
Wise, founded the
Anpagan Kingdom,
Armand Da'Ran was his historical equivalent, being the one man which allowed the
later
Anis-Anpagan
Dominion to thrive as a newborn nation. They both had their own "Bala'ur" to
fight and defeat and, by doing this, they had cleared a path for the later
generations to walk upon.